Media

Learn more

In 2008 Jiří Kylián created this mysterious, almost mystical ballet for four couples for the NDT with almost the identical team of composers, stage designers and project designers who had realized his “Zugvögel” (“Migratory Birds”) in Munich. “Gods and Dogs”, a puzzling double figure that emerged from the realm of the pharaohs, is a further step into the current cosmos of the Czech choreographer, who says of himself: “I am interested in the borderlines between normality and madness, between health and illness, and the norms which define both. At any moment of his life, a person can be designated as being in the one or the other category. But the precise moment when he is ultimately pushed over the border into pathological madness is beyond his perception.”

The Goldberg-Variations have tempted the widest variety of choreographers to venture interpretations over the decades, and they in turn have discovered the widest variety of valid solutions. One indisputable fact however is that the crown belongs to Jerome Robbins’s 1971 creation. “A terpsichorean play of jubilation”, wrote Horst Koegler after the world première: “the choreography as a paraphrase of space and motion, playing around the music, competing with it… a demonstration of a dance philosophy obligated only to itself, instructions for learning how to watch dance.” Robbins’s unmistakable adoption and casual variation of the classic motion canon, his instinct for structure and his absorption into Bach’s musical cosmos – the physical perfection of ballet transcended into a metaphysical event.

Jerome Robbins is world renowned for his work as a choreographer of ballets as wells as for his work as choreographer and director in theater, movies and television.

He started his career in 1939 when joining the corps de ballet of American Ballet Theatre. Soon, he was casted for principal roles in the works of Fokine, Tudor, Massine, Lichine, and de Milles. In 1944, Robbins created his first ballet, Fancy Free, which premiered with ABT. More than 60 ballets followed, for example Afternoon of a Faun (1953), The Concert (1956), Les Noces (1965), Dances at a Gathering (1969), In the Night (1970), The Goldberg Variations (1971), In G Major (1975), Other Dances (1976), Glass Pieces (1983) und Ives Songs (1989) which are in the repertoires of major dance companies throughout the world. He has worked closely with New York City Ballet. In 1949, he was given the position of Associate Artistic Director and, several years later, the position of Ballet-Master-in-Chief which he shared with Peter Martins.

Simultaneously, Robbins worked as a choreographer and director for numerous Broadway musicals and plays. Among them are On the Town (1945), Billion Dollar Baby (1946), High Button Shoes (1947), Miss Liberty (1949), Call me Madame (1950), The King and I (1951), Peter Pan (1954), West Side Story (1957), for which he received two Academy Awards, Gypsy (1959) and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). His last musical Jerome Robbins’ Broadway of 1989 won him six Tony Awards including Best Musical and Best Director.

Other awards and citations include five Donaldson Awards, an Emmy Award, the Screen Directors' Guild Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. He is a 1981 Kennedy Center Honors Recipient and was awarded the French Chevalier dans l'Ordre National de la Legion d'Honneur.

Bayerische Staatsoper

Die Bayerische Staatsoper

Tradition, continuity and an impressive repertoire: these are the solid pillars supporting the Bayerische Staatsoper – one of the world’s leading opera houses. It can look back proudly on a cultural history of over 350 years. Thanks to a court tradition, opera found a home in Munich in 1653; since then its music-historical and sociopolitical development has continued in a way unparalleled anywhere else, worldwide.The Bayerische Staatsoper, with some 600,000 persons attending its over 450 performances each year, makes a major contribution to Munich’s reputation as one of the great international cultural capitals.

In the course of a single season, over 40 operas from four centuries are performed along with ballets, concerts and song recitals. This makes the programme of the Bayerische Staatsoper one of the most richly varied performance schedules of all the international opera houses. With 2,101 seats, the Bayerische Staatsoper’s principal performance venue, the National Theatre – built in classicistic style in 1818 – is the largest opera house in Germany and ranks as one of the handsomest theatres in Europe. Tours of the National Theatre take place almost every day.